Quote (TransTankie @ 20 Apr 2019 00:58)
'Exploration history' XD.
I have in fact studied Early Modern history - including the early European voyages to the Americas. Different people reacted in different ways to foreigners on their shores. Sometimes they killed them, sometimes they enslaved them, sometimes they gave them gifts and looked after them. Montezuma gave Cortez a shitload of gold, the people gave gifts and regarded the spaniards as godlike. Cannibalism was relatively rare as far as we can tell. It definitely happened among the Mesoamerican Aztecs and Brazilian Tupinambá - we have evidence in fossilised faecal matter to prove it. However we don't know what kind of cannibalism we're talking about here. The tribes of the Amazon and Papua New Guinea are known to engage in what is known as 'mortuary cannibalism' in which they eat the flesh of the deceased as part of the funerary rites. The term Cannibal as well originates from Spanish explorers who called the people of the Americas 'Canibales'. Rumours abounded of them eating human flesh but even Columbus wrote in his diaries that there was no evidence to suggest it was true. Spectacular and fantastic stories of the Americas were commonplace. Montezuma is reported to have necromantic powers. The tribes of the Amazon supposedly rode the river on the backs of giant fish... and much is made of their savagery. The main defense for the conquerors when met with criticism, as ever with colonialisation, was the civilisation of the savage and so it became necessary to paint them in as savage a light as possible. Specifically for the Americas in the early modern period it was that they were proselytising and converting the populace to Christianity.
But yes - if you were alone and washed up on the shore the chances were you would be killed by the locals or taken into slavery. I can't remember much of it off the top of my head but there is the story of Jack Renton who was taken into slavery in the Solomon Islands in the 1800s and escaped... and it mentions no cannibalism whatsoever. Though it does mention shrunken heads. It's a cool story - you should look it up.
So yea - Cannibalism happened but to imply that it was ubiquitous or that the only fate that awaited lone white men who landed on the shores of the Americas was murder and cannibalism is extremely ignorant. To claim that it was even a likely event is to ignore the historical consensus. Hell many historians dispute whether it happened at all... I'm not in that camp though.
e/ Also it's worth noting that Europeans engaged in cannibalism of different kinds too. The remains of the dead have been used as medicines throughout history, human meat has been sold in markets during famines but also straight up murder and cannibalism occurred. Probably most notably during the first Crusade at Ma'Arra where Christians slaughtered and then ate the resident Muslims.
I'm under the impression that any race would have done the same as the whites in their position. If they didn't do those things in the past too, we would have never developed to the point that we are at today either.
Human is human, and we all know that it is a shitty nature. The only real thing we can focus on is the present and how we can live forward. Everybody blames the white people for the past when every race has done that to people inferior to them at some point of time in their history.